Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

Keywords: Extinction

  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2013: Watching as Iraq crumbled

    • Donna Mulhearn
    • 07 January 2014

    I sat with my Iraqi friend in his photo store. I was his last customer, he said; the bombs would begin tomorrow. And then he began to weep. I remember thinking that his life, and the lives of others like him, would not be given a second's thought once the invasion started. The next day, the bombs began.  

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Labor's light on the hill

    • Frank Brennan
    • 02 November 2013
    7 Comments

    'There have been innumerable post-mortems and words of advice as to how the party with new structures, election rules, and policies can pick itself up, dust off, and win the next election. Sadly some of those post-mortems have come with more coatings of spite and loathing. It is no part of my role in the public square as a Catholic priest to offer such advice.' Frank Brennan's address to the Bathurst Panthers Club, 2 November 2013.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    History repeats for powerful Australian women

    • Brian Matthews
    • 21 June 2013
    14 Comments

    On the face of it, life for a strong, talented and ambitious woman in 19th century Australia was much tougher than it is now. Yet even Louisa Lawson, a pioneer of women's rights who was grievously discriminated against and derided because she dared to excel, was never demeaned or personally debased to the extent Julia Gillard has been.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Watching as Iraq crumbled

    • Donna Mulhearn
    • 20 March 2013
    9 Comments

    I sat with my Iraqi friend in his photo store. I was his last customer, he said; the bombs would begin tomorrow. And then he began to weep. I remember thinking that his life, and the lives of others like him, would not be given a second's thought once the invasion started. The next day, the bombs began.  

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate view from a nation doomed to drown

    • Paul Collins
    • 14 December 2012
    15 Comments

    Kiribati, situated in the central Pacific Ocean and home to 101,998 people — more than half of them Catholic — will be the first country to be drowned by global warming. While we wring our hands and climate sceptics pretend there is no problem, on Kiribati people are already in the midst of a climate change disaster. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The trams revolt

    • Brian Matthews
    • 17 August 2012
    6 Comments

    Like a uniformed and undirected army, they queued end to end, an implacable wall of yellow and green. The trams seemed to squat somehow lower on their shiny rails — and all their lights went out. For more than a month they paralysed the city and everyone could see the government had entered its last days.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Last of the cat poems

    • Karl Cameron-Jackson and Mike Hopkins
    • 06 March 2012
    5 Comments

    With fresh blood in your mouth you are no longer cat, house-trained to please. Now you kill wantonly, revel in the fear you invoke in others. Man was created, just like you, to run free in the killing-fields ... Is this what God meant you to be? To revert to what you once were?

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Aboriginal community ditched by church and state

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 24 November 2011
    8 Comments

    The remote community of Toomelah was a state-run Aboriginal mission with a strong church presence. A raft of social problems have emerged in place of the traditional culture that was usurped by these influences. Cultural extinction is perhaps the biggest issue facing such communities.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Staking out our vampire fetish

    • Brian Matthews
    • 11 August 2010
    1 Comment

    For all our modern sophistication, refinement and technology, we remain in imaginative thrall to one of the most venerable and terrifying of folk figures. The vampire combines two of human kind's profoundly obsessive preoccupations: mortality and sex.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    How to survive the next five billion years

    • Jeffrey Nicholls
    • 09 July 2010
    3 Comments

    Every year we mine about a billion tonnes of iron ore. If we keep this up for five billion years, we will have dug up the whole earth to a depth of about 10 km. Here is a guide to how human existence might continue until the sun dies.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    Time to start worrying about fish

    • Sarah Burnside
    • 29 October 2009
    7 Comments

    Australia's decision to reduce its intake of the endangered southern bluefin tuna has outraged the industry. The global fishing industry is unsustainable, and fishing is second only to climate change as the greatest environmental threat to marine ecosystems.

    READ MORE
  • EUREKA STREET/ READER'S FEAST AWARD

    Money doesn't make babies happy

    • Stephen Wright
    • 30 September 2009
    6 Comments

    We are terrible at caring for the planet because we are terrible at caring for each other. And we are lousy at caring for each other because we don't seem to have any idea of where the roots of human emotional sustenance lie. We might begin to look at our obsessive love of money and power.

    READ MORE